Cornering the World of Warcraft Markets

Terra Nova has a post up about a financial development on the World of Warcraft server Elune. From the article: "two players recently bought out the entire contents of the Auction House in Ironforge, with the exception of premium-priced high-level weapons and armor (e.g., they bought all the trade goods) and then resold all of what they bought at a higher price." They go on to discuss the event in the context of Massive Game economies and the results that tradeskills can have on monetary inflation.

Comments

Tradeskilling in general

[faloi]

I saw similar things happen in EQ. Basically the most dedicated tradeskillers got together and set base prices on what they'd pay for components, and what they'd expect for their items. That trick worked for a period of time, until players that weren't "tuned in" to the system started to lowball them. The auction nature of WoW will probably cause it to take longer for the prices to get back to normal, but I don't anticpate there'll be a long term effect. Sombodies gotten rich though, assuming players buy their stuff...

Re:I fail to grasp the (perceived) problem

[Achoi77]

The problem lies with people farming gold and selling it for real money. Eventaully what will happen is that the market will inflate so high that only players that have purchased their virtual money for real money will have any substantial coin to purchase what they want/need.

"What's this? The Big Bad Gun of Slaying costs 2200 gold?? There is no way I can manage to collect that much gold! Hrm, lemme ebay for people selling gold on my server..."

Ten bucks says that the players monopolizing the market are also the friendly ebay merchants that are selling you money..

inflation..

[gl4ss]

is huge in wow.

which isn't a surprise as basically everything you can kill drops money(or something that you can sell for a buck for a npc) - so a lot of money enters the world.

it needs some serious tweaking.. as now theres professions which simply are not worth doing. you don't get items that are really worth jack from them and selling them for a buck isn't that good business either - basically as said out in the post the best way to make a buck is to be on the raw material side of the business and not on the refining side, as you can get endless amounts of those raw materials(but if you're a refiner you're going to need a lot of those materials to train your skill to be on any level of use, at which point you quite probably already have gotten better equipment than what you can make).

and getting skilled is a lot easier(faster - there is no playing skill involved beyond patience) if you got the cash to just buy the raw materials out of AH - so don't rush into refining(it's not particularly exciting to make copper pants anyhow so you can't justify it with that either), you can change the skills later anyways if you want and later you'll have the cash to buy the raw materials to get the skill up faster.

(no.. fun does not begin at lvl 60.)

Re:inflation..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm reminded of the economic system as implemented on Shattered World (where I used to code for a while; gave up last year for various reasons.) The principle is simple: most online games simply haemorrhage gold out of monsters. The end result is that gold eventually becomes worthless, in effect.

What's happening here is that all these fancy schmancy MMORPGs, like Everquest, WoW, and their ilk, are rediscovering things that the old, geriatric text-based MUDs have known for years. There's nothing new happening here; it's just that there's a larger audience to see it happening now.

Re:Interesting

[llevity]

No, but in a way, it encourages people to buy gold for RL money. How else can they afford these inflated in game prices, when the price is beyond what they accrue during normal gameplay?

Re:I fail to grasp the (perceived) problem

[superpulpsicle]

Real world economics in online game is a serious problem. There is no Alan Greenspan to offset the economy with whatever adjustments.

The 1st person to own a sword played 10hrs to earn money to buy it. Then sell it at higher price.

The 2nd person to own a sword played 20hrs to earn money to buy it. Then sell it at higher price.

The 3rd person to own a sword played 30hrs to earn money to buy it. Then sell it at higher price.

Repeat, repeat. Afterwards every other sword with the same performance will go on sale at that high price.

One way to solve the problem

[mrjimorg]

If they made it so you could put in a request at the auction house for an item, and list an amount that your willing to pay, then people who have product for sale would better know the value of the things they're trying to sell, and they could get an sell their items on the spot, walk away with their cash, and the people who want a resource but dont want to sit all day in the auction house looking for cheeper prices could get their items at a reasonable price.

Re:I fail to grasp the (perceived) problem

[Anonymous Coward]

> Real world economics in online game is a serious problem. There is no Alan Greenspan to offset the economy with whatever adjustments.

Blizzard has the ability to create a complete fiat economy by simply materializing new goods into the auction house ad infinitum.

Just like OPEC

[sideshow]

This is why OPEC doesn't immediatly raise oil prices to $200 a barrel (well, besides the possibility of every non-OPEC country sending in their armed forces).

All these guys agree on a high price but after a while one of them breaks ranks and makes a huge profit, lowering the market price.